In A Splendor of Letters, Nicholas A. Basbanes continues the lively, richly anecdotal exploration of book people, places, and culture he began in 1995 with A Gentle Madness (a finalist that year for the National Book Critics Circle Award) and expanded in 2001 with Patience & Fortitude, a companion work that prompted the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and biographer David McCullough to proclaim him -the leading authority of books about books.- In this beautifully packaged edition, Basbanes brings to a close his wonderful trilogy on the remarkable world...

In A Splendor of Letters, Nicholas A. Basbanes continues the lively, richly anecdotal exploration of book people, places, and culture he b...

Inspired by a landmark exhibition mounted by the British Museum in 1963 to celebrate five eventful centuries of the printed word, Nicholas A. Basbanes offers a lively consideration of writings that have -made things happen- in the world, works that have both nudged the course of history and fired the imagination of countless influential people.

In his fifth work to examine a specific aspect of book culture, Basbanes also asks what we can know about such figures as John Milton, Edward Gibbon, John Locke, Isaac Newton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Adams, Frederick Douglass,...

Inspired by a landmark exhibition mounted by the British Museum in 1963 to celebrate five eventful centuries of the printed word, Nicholas...

Long before there were creative-writing workshops and degrees, how did aspiring writers learn to write? By reading the work of their predecessors and contemporaries, says Francine Prose.

In Reading Like a Writer, Prose invites you to sit by her side and take a guided tour of the tools and the tricks of the masters. She reads the work of the very best writers—Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Kafka, Austen, Dickens, Woolf, Chekhov—and discovers why their work has endured. She takes pleasure in the long and magnificent sentences of Philip Roth and the breathtaking paragraphs of...

Long before there were creative-writing workshops and degrees, how did aspiring writers learn to write? By reading the work of their predecessors a...

In Words I Wish I Wrote, Robert Fulghum reveals the works of writers who have inspired him. During the past four decades he's reviewed and revised the basic principles of his philosophy many times, sometimes as an exercise in personal growth, but more often in response to individual crisis. Then at fifty, seeking a simplicity to counter the complex thinking of his college years, Fulghum wrote a summary essay professing that all he really needed to know he learned in kindergarten. As he approached his sixtieth year, Fulghum became curious about what in his outlook had changed and...

In Words I Wish I Wrote, Robert Fulghum reveals the works of writers who have inspired him. During the past four decades he's reviewed and r...

They say you can't judge a book by its cover--but its title can tell you more than you ever needed to know

Amazing, illuminating, and gut-bustingly funny, Bizarre Books is the wonderfully twisted product of more than two decades of determined searching in forgotten corners of out-of-the-way libraries and through the literary detritus of eclectic private collections. It is certain to delight every true fan of trivia and the patently absurd.

They say you can't judge a book by its cover--but its title can tell you more than you ever needed to know

Now in print for the first time in almost 40 years, The New Lifetime Reading Plan provides readers with brief, informative and entertaining introductions to more than 130 classics of world literature. From Homer to Hawthorne, Plato to Pascal, and Shakespeare to Solzhenitsyn, the great writers of Western civilization can be found in its pages. In addition, this new edition offers a much broader representation of women authors, such as Charlotte Bront%, Emily Dickinson and Edith Wharton, as well as non-Western writers such as Confucius, Sun-Tzu, Chinua Achebe, Mishima Yukio and many...

Now in print for the first time in almost 40 years, The New Lifetime Reading Plan provides readers with brief, informative and entertaining i...

This book explores an important boundary between history and literature: the antebellum reading public for books written by Americans. Zboray describes how fiction took root in the United States and what literature contributed to the readers' sense of themselves. He traces the rise of fiction as a social history centered on the book trade and chronicles the large societal changes shaping, circumscribing, and sometimes defining the limits of the antebellum reading public. A Fictive People explodes two notions that are commonplace in cultural histories of the nineteenth century: first,...

This book explores an important boundary between history and literature: the antebellum reading public for books written by Americans. Zboray describe...

This casebook gathers a collection of ambitious essays about both parts of the novel (1605 and 1615) and also provides a general introduction and a bibliography. The essays range from Ramon Menendez Pidal's seminal study of how Cervantes dealt with chivalric literature to Erich Auerbachs polemical study of Don Quixote as essentially a comic book by studying its mixture of styles, and include Leo Spitzer's masterful probe into the essential ambiguity of the novel through minute linguistic analysis of Cervantes prose. The book includes pieces by other major Cervantes scholars, such as Manuel...

This casebook gathers a collection of ambitious essays about both parts of the novel (1605 and 1615) and also provides a general introduction and a bi...

This casebook gathers a collection of ambitious essays about both parts of the novel (1605 and 1615) and also provides a general introduction and a bibliography. The essays range from Ramon Menendez Pidal's seminal study of how Cervantes dealt with chivalric literature to Erich Auerbachs polemical study of Don Quixote as essentially a comic book by studying its mixture of styles, and include Leo Spitzer's masterful probe into the essential ambiguity of the novel through minute linguistic analysis of Cervantes' prose. The book includes pieces by other major Cervantes scholars, such as...

This casebook gathers a collection of ambitious essays about both parts of the novel (1605 and 1615) and also provides a general introduction and a bi...

This casebook on D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers is the first to address itself to the full text of the novel, first published in 1992. The introduction discusses the novel's composition and the range of approaches adopted by critics since its original publication in 1913. The nine essays that follow demonstrate the full extent of the contemporary critical response, from studies of narrative technique to psychoanalytic and gender-based analysis, and set the critical agenda for its study in the twenty-first century. This collection also reproduces excerpts from Lawrence's letters...

This casebook on D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers is the first to address itself to the full text of the novel, first published in 1992. The ...

The recovery of Dante's metaphysics - which are very different from our own - is essential, argues Christian Moevs, if we are to resolve what has been called "the central problem in the interpretation of the Comedy." That problem is what to make of the Comedy's claim to the status of revelation, vision, or experiential record - as something more than imaginative literature. In this book Moevs offers the first sustained treatment of the metaphysical picture that grounds and motivates the Comedy, and the relation between those metaphysics and Dante's poetics. Moevs...

The recovery of Dante's metaphysics - which are very different from our own - is essential, argues Christian Moevs, if we are to resolve what has been...

From the best-selling author of The Professor and the Madman, The Map That Changed the World, and Krakatoa comes a truly wonderful celebration of the English language and of its unrivaled treasure house, the Oxford English Dictionary.

Writing with marvelous brio, Winchester first serves up a lightning history of the English language--"so vast, so sprawling, so wonderfully unwieldy"--and pays homage to the great dictionary makers, from "the irredeemably famous" Samuel Johnson to the "short, pale, smug and boastful" schoolmaster from New Hartford, Noah Webster. He...

From the best-selling author of The Professor and the Madman, The Map That Changed the World, and Krakatoa comes a truly wo...

Radical Satire and Print Culture 1790-1822 focuses on the work produced collaboratively between 1816 and 1822 by the poet and radical journalist William Hone and the brilliant young graphic satirist George Cruikshank. Wood provides a much needed analytical framework for Regency radical satire uncovering a set of new sources and previously unknown cultural contexts for Hone and Cruikshank's work, which is shown to combine modernity and tradition in thrilling ways. Entertaining and original, this is an important contribution to the study of radical satire, which sheds new light on the relations...

Radical Satire and Print Culture 1790-1822 focuses on the work produced collaboratively between 1816 and 1822 by the poet and radical journalist Willi...

This book studies changes in the practice of literary criticism in nineteenth-century Britain and locates those changes within wider movements in intellectual culture. The growth of knowledge and its subsequent institutionalization in universities produced new forms of intellectual authority. Small examines these processes in a wide variety of disciplines, including economics, historiography, sociology, psychology, and philosophical aesthetics, and explores their impact upon literary criticism.

This book studies changes in the practice of literary criticism in nineteenth-century Britain and locates those changes within wider movements in inte...

Herodotus, referred to by Cicero and others as "the father of history," was the first to make the events of the past the subject of research and verification, and to relate their consequences to the present. In this commentary on Histories, an account of the struggle between Persia and Greece from the time of Croesus to that of Xerxes, How and Wells show that there are frequent digressions that give a wealth of information about the customs and cultures of peoples foreign to the Greeks. Providing a standard commentary of the Histories, this two-volume work will interest scholars as well as...

Herodotus, referred to by Cicero and others as "the father of history," was the first to make the events of the past the subject of research and verif...

Examining the complex relationships between the political, popular, sexual, and textual interests of Nathaniel Hawthorne's work, Lauren Berlant argues that Hawthorne mounted a sophisticated challenge to America's collective fantasy of national unity. She shows how Hawthorne's idea of citizenship emerged from an attempt to adjudicate among the official and the popular, the national and the local, the collective and the individual, utopia and history. At the core of Berlant's work is a three-part study of The Scarlet Letter, analyzing the modes and effects of national identity that...

In "The Art of Criticism," William Veeder and Susan M. Griffin have brought together for the first time the best of the Master's critical work: the most important of his Prefaces, which R. P. Blackmur has called "the most sustained and I think the most eloquent and original piece of literary criticism in existence"; his studies of Hawthorne, George Eliot, Balzac, Zola, de Maupassant, Turgenev, Sante-Beuve, and Arnold; and his essays on the function of criticism and the future of the novel. The editors have provided what James himself emphasized in his literary criticism-the text's...

In "The Art of Criticism," William Veeder and Susan M. Griffin have brought together for the first time the best of the Master's critical work: the mo...

In The Nature of the Book, a tour de force of cultural history, Adrian Johns constructs an entirely original and vivid picture of print culture and its many arenas--commercial, intellectual, political, and individual.

"A compelling exposition of how authors, printers, booksellers and readers competed for power over the printed page. . . . The richness of Mr. Johns's book lies in the splendid detail he has collected to describe the world of books in the first two centuries after the printing press arrived in England."--Alberto Manguel, Washington Times

" A] mammoth and...

In The Nature of the Book, a tour de force of cultural history, Adrian Johns constructs an entirely original and vivid picture of print culture...

In The Nature of the Book, a tour de force of cultural history, Adrian Johns constructs an entirely original and vivid picture of print culture and its many arenas commercial, intellectual, political, and individual. "A compelling exposition of how authors, printers, booksellers and readers competed for power over the printed page. . . . The richness of Mr. Johns's book lies in the splendid detail he has collected to describe the world of books in the first two centuries after the printing press arrived in England." Alberto Manguel, Washington Times" A] mammoth and...

In The Nature of the Book, a tour de force of cultural history, Adrian Johns constructs an entirely original and vivid picture of print culture...